How to Select a Domain for a Business

Domains are essential for any business. It allows a personalized email and website to represent the brand. This allows potential customers to get a better understanding of your brand through a detailed website or for company representatives to communicate with business partners and customers through the email. However, selecting a suitable domain for your company takes serious consideration and creativity.

With the infinite amounts of existing domains, how can businesses create an original but eye-catching URL to represent their companies? Below are a few tips to follow when creating a domain.

Use your imaginationLarger businesses created their online presence long ago, forcing the hand of more modest counterparts and burgeoning start-ups to be more creative when selecting a domain name. The uniqueness of a name determines how likely it is to be remembered, a factor that influences the process of choosing the name of your actual business. As with your business name, it is important that the web address of a company is not forgotten easily or confused with other businesses. This requires creativity! Techniques such as combining two words (YouTube) or actually tweaking a word (Tumblr) are just two examples of creative ways to secure a valuable domain name.Respect the lawEvery business is unique in some way, but particularly when it comes to company names and registered trademarks. It might be attractive to some businesses to try and use the success of a more famous counterpart, which may have a short-term benefit, but ultimately it’s not an advisable long-term strategy.It may bring a decent amount of visitors to the site, but ultimately it sets the company back substantially in online marketing in the long run.Choose your words carefullyGoogle has an AdWords Keyword Tool that can show you the most relevant keywords to your business. This can influence your web address selection, because using these accurately and properly helps Google recognise what your website and business does and will help it to rank higher in searches. Brainstorm keywords amongst your team or speak to your potential customers. Find out what they use to refer to businesses such as yours and utilise this information. Remember though that simplicity is also key, web addresses exist for customers, and they h should not be hard to understand.Think carefully about your domain extensionWhile businesses might be really focused on how their company name is reflected in a web address, the extension of the address should be seen as just as important. There are many options available and the numbers of these continue to grow. However, the .com remains the globally recognised standard. Although it may have a global pull, .com is suitable for businesses of all sizes, adding credibility to a brand, future-proofing for expansion in times to come, but also helping ensure your business be easily found in Google searches – something which not all other extensions can guarantee. Having .com as your business extension gives it a global pull, adds credibility to your brand, future proofs expansion and also ensures that your business is easily found on google. However, if you choose not to go with a .com extension then choose something that blends with your business like .ca (for Canadaian businesses) or .org (for Organisations)